the.com/gramophone
the machine that taught dead voices to haunt your living room forever
means An early sound-reproducing device that plays recorded audio from a flat spinning disc, the ancestor of the record player.
from Coined in the 1880s by inventor Emile Berlinger for his disc-playing machine, built from Greek roots 'gramma' (something written or recorded) and 'phone' (sound or voice) — literally 'written sound.' It was, in part, a deliberate flip of 'phonograph' (Edison's earlier cylinder machine), as if rearranging the Greek could rearrange the market.
- hand-cranked
- No electricity needed, just elbow grease and patience
- acoustic horn
- Sound amplified by physics alone, zero batteries
- His Master's
- Dog Nipper became history's most famous logo
- 78 rpm
- Records spun fast, lasted barely three minutes
- shellac discs
- Made partly from beetle secretions, surprisingly
victrola — victor talking machine company's spring-wound gramophone, iconic from 1906 onward with the 'his master's voice' logo
edison phonograph — thomas edison's 1877 tinfoil cylinder phonograph, first device to record and reproduce sound